Informatix

Less than a month

Admin 12:51 am on 18 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

In less than a month, my students will face their final test and enjoy a long weekend before they start studying again on January. Many assignments have been submitted and i have took some of my time to mark those assignments before it's piling my room and my inbox.

So far, most of them have done a great job and i'm quite happy with it. There are still those who didn't work out and probably abandon the class for this semester. I can't do anything about it. It's their choice, but as a grown up people, i think they should start to think more like a mature person.

Let's just hope there will not be too many failed students this semester

What a Day

Admin 5:27 am on 17 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Yeah... i have finally experienced how it's like to teach five classes a day. I started my first class at 8.30 and followed by the second class at 10.30. My third class was on 12.30 and my forth on 15.00. My last class was in 17.30.

Due to this tight schedule, i haven't got time to had lunch, so i was quite starving after i got home.

Tomorrow, i will have four classes instead of two classes due to the same reason i taught five classes today. Let's get some rest and we will see tomorrow

Busy Day

Admin 5:39 am on 16 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Tomorrow, i will have five classes instead of three classes as usual. It's because my colleague is at Jakarta for five days training so he asked me to replace him to teach two of his classes tomorrow.

Actually, i have never been teaching five classes a day, but tomorrow will be my first experience. I hope i can manage to finish this task successfully

New Game From Quantz

Admin 1:36 pm on 15 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Quantz is "a unique puzzle action game" developed by Gamerizon and it's likely to be released this month for Windows and Linux. It's very unique, because it's like a Zuma on a 3D platform where you have to finish all the bubbles by matching it with 4 other bubbles.

Below is the trailer from YouTube:

Fully Linux

Admin 6:20 am on 15 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Few days ago, i bought a new laptop since my previous laptop had a problem with one of the rotating pin which is used when opening/closing the lid. It's an ASUS UL80vt with good specifications. Check it on Amazon but mine is using 500 GB of hard drive instead of 320 GB listed on Amazon's site. The rest is the same.

It comes with a pre-installed Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit edition since it is equipped with 4 GB of RAM. I tried Windows 7 a little bit and i found it lighter than Vista, but some UACL annoyance is still there (even though it's less than in Vista).

At home, i reformatted the hard drive and removed all Windows 7 partition (including the hidden partition) and i install Slackware Linux 13.0 on it. I wanted to use Linux fully on this laptop. It's a new challenge, but i'm sure i'll live with it

My experience installing Slackware and fixing bugs on this laptop has been written on my SlackBlogs

Competition

Admin 5:43 am on 14 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Usually, i give my assignments on my first class of the semester. My idea is that the students would have longer time to think about the assignment and plan a schedule to work on it. But what happened next is that most of them never do the assignment until it's almost deadline. In the end, they would end up with pile of assignments from other lecturers and they complaint that the assignments are too much

So i changed my habit a little bit by giving an extra project each week with only a small quota (2 students per class) and the time duration is very short (2 days at maximum). The response are quite interesting, because they compete with each others and try to do the extra project as fast as they could.

Maybe i will change the teaching method, mostly the assignments for the next semester. Let's hope it will motivate them even better.

Another Patent for Microsoft

Admin 4:17 am on 13 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Microsoft has been granted a patent for systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. In GNU/Linux terms, it's like su/sudo.

Does it mean that any next GNU/Linux distribution will be released without su or sudo to elevate their privileges to administrate the systems? Should we logged out first and logged in as root to change the systems settings?

More information see Gizmodo.

Image courtesy of xkcd

One Week Late

Admin 1:21 pm on 12 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Wine development version is scheduled to be released every two weeks, but it's almost three weeks since the last release, which was on October 23. If they follow the normal biweekly schedule, it should have been released on November 6 and by tomorrow, it will be a three weeks schedule.

I am not sure what took them to have one week delay on the next development release (1.1.33), but what i'm sure is that they keep working to make Wine works better with more and more Windows applications and also implementing many Windows system calls inside Wine.

So far, they have managed to make a great release and i'm looking forward to see much better improvement on every release

Rapid7 Acquired Metasploit

Admin 4:29 am on 11 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Rapid7 has acquired Metasploit, a project which was created to provide information on exploit techniques and to create a useful resource for exploit developers and security professionals.

Started from a hobby and part time job, Metasploit has given HD a full time job in Rapid7 as Chief Security Officer. Congrats to HD

They are also hiring for more position. Check their blog for more information.

New to GIT?

Admin 6:03 am on 10 November 2009 | 0 Permalink

Are you new to GIT? Then you might want to have a look on Linus' presentation about GIT on Google TechTalks. It is a live video and he gave more than one hour of presentation (1:10:14 for more precisely).

Please note that if you are a CVS/SVN users and you loved it so much, you might avoid clicking above link because you may get angry with him